


Exspiravit

by TheTartWitch



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: "Exspiravit" Ghost, Allen is amnesiac, Gen, Not A Harem Fic, and hasn't ever been an exorcist, but not for the Noah or the Earl, in fact he hunts them, in the desert, village of only women
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-04 22:37:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5350961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is a ghost, a wandering phantom. Who he was is of no consequence, seeing as he can't remember anything anyway. The monsters are weak compared to him, but exorcists are coming to destroy his peace, as he knew they would.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exspiravit

The night is stark and cold, pressing in from the distant dunes like an oppressing ruler. Daylight is far away, but eventually it will drag the warmth back into his bones. He pulls himself up out of the sand, shaking the powdery rock from his clothes in vain and struggling to take a step forward.

He won’t die here.

(0)

The weapon dangling from his shoulder is meaningless: there is nothing to destroy here but himself, and he _will_ survive. That man may not have everything. This will be his final rebellion.

But at the same time, his traitorous instincts (no doubt pounded into his skull beside a panda’s fist) are quiet, plotting to overthrow his rational judgment and possibly devour an arm or leg or two.

The sky is quiet now. He wonders if there are vultures in the desert. He wouldn’t know.

(0)

Somehow, time passes in a dubstep bass rhythm. It spikes, going faster and faster until he feels dizzy simply because he doesn’t know what’s happened in the time that escaped him. Then it plummets, the tempo leaving him bereft and plodding like a pack horse. He wonders which one he hates more.

He wonders what he was before this. A soldier? He certainly has the weaponry for it. An arm that becomes a gun, a claw, a sword. An eye that can see the difference between what uses the body and what is chained to the shell like a sobbing dog. Quick muscles, instincts that almost had him vaporize a lizard that he could move fast enough on a desert diet to catch and eat.

Who was he?

Did it matter?

(0)

He stepped onto solid ground finally, and it felt unusually still beneath him: no sliding for traction, no wiping dusty grit from his eyes every other step. He stopped after five steps and blinked, registering that something had changed.

Something grabbed his hand and he had a revolving machine gun hand pointed at its fingers immediately. His expression didn’t change. He was bone-weary, ready to defend himself the way he hadn’t had to in the desert.

It was a little girl. Her eyes were big and milky blue, and she giggled when she raised her other palm to his face, ghosting it over his nose. He didn’t move. Threats could look like anything, but he didn’t kill innocents. Somehow, that went against his moral compass.

Standing a bit away on what appears to be a road, a woman is pale and clutching a white-knuckled fist to her mouth. Her eyes are also blue, but they’re brighter and more vibrant than the girl’s. An older sister, maybe.

“Prue!” She whispers, her breath catching. His head tilts. She sounds terrified, indicating something life-threatening. He lets his eyes flick away from her for a moment and scan for the threats, but he doesn’t notice anything that strikes him as odd.

Oh. The gun barrel an inch away from the girl’s head. He forgot about that. He pulls it away and it becomes a hand again, curling into the girl’s hair. It’s black and wavy, pulled into a knot on the back of her head. The woman’s is looser, falling haphazardly onto her shoulder and dripping onto her chest.

“Prue. Leave him alone, dear.” The woman is calmer now that the perceived threat to the child is gone. The girl’s head shakes quickly, back-and-forth.

“No.” She smiles. “You’ve come a long way, haven’t you, Mister?” She questions, her milky eyes slipping from his nose to his eyebrows, and his lips curl. He’s smiling.

She takes his hand from her hair and begins to pull him towards the woman. He lets her.

(0)

The village Prue and Esca inhabit is Akuma-free: he checks it himself, disturbing everyone in their daily activities to get a good look. Prue seems to think it’s fascinating, and laughs when he gets scolded by the oldest lady in the tents. His face doesn’t change, but when she hangs off his arm in a fit of giggles he lets her.

They help him build a tent to sleep in, and get him settled, showing him where to draw safe water and how to safely cook certain things so that they’re no longer poisonous. Funny. He ate them just fine before, in the desert, but here he eats it safely for Prue. She pouts when he tells her this, but doesn’t comment.

He knows she’s smiling when he turns his back though.

(0)

They call him Ghost, because even though he remembers how to operate his offensive appendage and knew it was imperative there be no Akuma in Prue’s village, he doesn’t remember his name or where he came from. It wasn’t necessary in the desert and his brain deleted it. His hair is white, and long scars and pockmarks along his skin (that should have killed him but here he is, defying the laws of life) have made the villagers consider him almost a deity: the man who wandered out of the desert emotionless and ready to destroy, but befriended the blindest girl in the village within three minutes, under a vow of silence, apparently, for he never spoke. It was useless, anyhow. Words made no difference.

He protects the village when one of the girls is eaten by a ghoul in the form of a hyena and cements his place in the lives of the villagers.

Life is good, even with the monster attacks, but he knows, deep inside the shell of his soul, that peace can never last. Too many things thrive on disrupting it.

\--+--

“There’s a legend that recently started going around the villages in the land near the desert, about a tall man with white hair and an arm that can become a gun, a sword, or a trident, depending on his whim. He’s fought off the ‘monsters’ they have over there with ease; most likely the local akuma.” Johnny finished his report and set the file down on Komui’s desk with a short explosion of dust.

“An exorcist?” Lenalee questioned, her hands waving the cloud away from her lungs. “Where did he come from?”

“Apparently he just came wandering out of the desert. They call him ‘Ghost’ because his facial expressions don’t ever change and he fights off the ‘unholy beasts’ just because. He never asks for payment.” Johnny said softly, his fingers dancing nervously over the surface of the file. It was thin, but getting thicker by the day. “Guys, handle this one with caution. He took down a couple of level twos by himself, without any help and barely breaking a sweat each time.”

Kanda growled.

“When do we leave?”

Komui grinned like a shark.

“Why, all three of you leave right now, including my darling Lenalee! If anything happens to her, you boys can be assured of never having any children!”

Lavi and Kanda reflexively crossed their legs. “Yes sir!”

(0)

They’re on the train traveling to the most recent site of the rumors when it happens. An encounter, but not with an Akuma.

A man pulls the door open and glares down at them. “You gonna arrest Ghost? Huh, exorcists?” He spits at Kanda and sneers at Lavi. His apparent respect for women also applies to Lenalee, for he simply dips his head to her.

“What?” She asks, eyebrows knotting. The man sighs.

(0)

“Ghost. The God-Man. The Hunter. The Slayer. Whatever you wanna call him.” The man pauses to take a swig out of his beer. “He don’t ask any unnecessary questions, he don’t hurt innocents, and he don’t take payment.” Lenalee nodded encouragingly to him, and he continued in a more subdued tone, “He saved my life, and my wife’s. No questions asked at all, just helped us out. We pray for him every night, just for that.”

“How does he know what’s a monster and what’s a human?” Lavi wonders aloud, tilting his beer bottle at an angle. Kanda snorts.

The man points to his eye. “He said he’d got cursed; said he did somethin’ horrible and got punished for it, and now he can see their souls. And anybody ‘round him when he turns the thing on can too; can see them dead things floating up ‘round their heads!” As he got drunker, his grammar and enunciation began to slip until he was missing consonants and vowels all over the place. Lavi felt his eye begin to twitch.

“A curse in his eye?”

“Aye; looks right like a shootin’ star. Shot right up his cheek an’ through his eye, up by his eyebrow. ‘E says it’s proof he murdered somebody but he don’t remember, an’ me and the wife don’ believe ‘im. Nobody that kind could kill somebody in cold blood.”

The three exorcists held their breath. A cursed eye, taken as proof of murder? Lavi drained his drink.

“What if he was fighting a monster and someone died on his watch? A guy like that, who protects the people for the sake of protecting the people, would feel guilty if someone he swore to save died under his guard. Maybe he did it to himself.” Even drunk, his grammar was impeccable.

Lenalee smacked him. “Don’t make up rampant stories before I’ve even met the man, or I’ll have odd preconceptions.”

“Yes ma’am.”

(0)

They reached the village and settled in by the side of the road, waiting for someone to come along and lead them to the town, as the villagers had promised.

A tall, spindly man with a robe covering his features and a face mask and gloves smothering his face and hands soon came gracefully down the path. His eyes were shadowed by the robe’s hood, and he didn’t speak; he pointed in the direction he’d come from and turned around, completely disregarding if they were following or not.

When they get to the village, a small girl about fourteen in age comes right up to him and hugs him. His movements are jerky, as though he’s forgotten how to move like a human, but he hugs her back. She whispers softly into his ear and he lifts her, bridal-style, into his arms.

“So you’ve come about Exspiravit? The Ghost?” The oldest woman asks, and when the exorcists look around they notice the covered stranger is the only man in sight. He, Kanda, and Lavi are the only men in the village.

Lenalee takes a dainty step forward, and all three newcomers see their guide’s head tilt, like he heard something interesting.

“Yes; we’re exorcists from the Black Order who’ve come to investigate and possibly remove them if they appear to be a threat.” Her demeanor is polite, her tone is calming, and yet that vague sense of danger exudes from the ground she’s perched on. Despite being anchored to the ground, she gives the impression of a bird with spread wings: about to take off and fly, something powerful waiting to come out.

The woman scoffs. “I see! Myth-hunters, aren’t you? Come to seek something that may not even exist!”

Lenalee smiles calmly. “We’ve spoken to a witness. They were quite detailed, and it matches out reports. Where is he?”

The little girl laughs, high and clear. She taps the man’s arm and he lowers her gently to the dusty earth.

“Such rudeness! He is right before you!”

(0)

Their guide is Exspiravit, the Fighting Ghost. The girl’s name is Prue, and he speaks to none but her, and even then it is silent.

“He talks to you, but it’s silent?” Lavi asks, dubious. Prue smacks his head. She’s quite violent with them now that she knows them (though they notice she’s unusually gentle with Exspiravit, and he with her).

“Yes! I just said that! Pay attention!” Esca, Prue’s older sister, shrugs when they glance at her; it makes no sense to anyone but Prue and her Fighting Ghost. She takes over the story-telling anyway, since Prue’s version confuses even Esca, who was there.

“I was getting water with Prue, and he came staggering out of the desert. He was covered in sand and looked like a ghoul – we get attacks from those sometimes – and Prue ran right up to him.” Here she pauses and eyes the silent pair in the corner. Exspiravit is quietly tracing symbols on Prue’s palm and she is giggling. He doesn’t look like a Fighting Spirit; he looks like a child. “She grabs him around the arm, and he just reacts so fast – his hand becomes a huge gun, with a barrel the size of Prue’s head, and all the while his face is this empty gaze, like he’s dead and his body wandered out of the desert without his soul. She starts talking to him like she’s known him forever and he seems to realize she’s not gonna hurt him, so his hand turns back into a hand again.”

Lenalee interrupts. “He can change his body parts into weapons?”

“Just his hand!” Esca clarifies, shuddering. “Goodness, the things he could do…”

“And now he lives here?” Lavi asks, “No questions asked?”

Prue doesn’t answer, just gives his direction an angry glance and wraps an arm around Exspiravit possessively. He doesn’t say anything either, but that’s nothing new.

(0)


End file.
